


The Words Beneath Your Door

by Chromat1cs



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Canon Divergence - Post-Hogwarts, Domestic, First Kiss, Fix-It, Getting Together, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, M/M, Marauders Era (Harry Potter), Not Actually Unrequited Love, POV First Person, POV Remus Lupin, Pining, Remus Lupin is a florid little shit, Roommates, and Sirius reads Muggle encyclopedias for fun, and cardamom biscuits, and very very toshy, gratuitous use of The Runaways
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-13
Updated: 2020-07-13
Packaged: 2021-03-04 00:02:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,723
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24514297
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chromat1cs/pseuds/Chromat1cs
Summary: It is 1979, Remus is steadily losing control of his higher functions, and Sirius won't stop fucking touching him. Perhaps the two are related, but there isn't enough space left in the cold fusion core of Remus' brain to parse that out.
Relationships: Sirius Black/Remus Lupin
Comments: 18
Kudos: 219
Collections: RS Fix It Fest 2020





	The Words Beneath Your Door

**Author's Note:**

> Love to J. for the beta read, and thank you all for reading! I found a lot of peace in writing this story, and hope the careful fragility I plucked up here can be something good for you as well <3

_ Je te laisserai des mots  
_ _ En dessous de ta porte,  
_ _ En dessous de la lune qui chante,  
_ _ Tout pres de la place ou tes pieds passent,  
_ _ Cache dans les trous de temps d'hiver;  
_ _ Et quand tu es seule pendant un instant,  
_ _ Embrasse moi  
_ _ Quand tu voudras… _

—  _ Je te laisserai des mots, _ Patrick Watson

—

When I was a boy, I loved the feeling of a cool hand on my cheek. My mother used to cradle me all bundled up, folded into her lap, reading through my favorite book for the fourth time and probably hoping I would drift off in the middle of it. But I wouldn't drift off, hanging onto her every word, and eventually she would do it—our little ritual, a sort of spell in and of itself: she would close the book, turn to me with her eyes honest-wide, and say,  _ Darling, you know what time it is.  _

And even though I knew exactly what she meant, I would say,  _ No, Mummy, tell me what time it is.  _

My mother would then press her hand against my cheek, a hallowed thing that felt like dittany against all the worst sort of woes and smelled faintly of roses, I think, if I remember properly, and would kiss me on the forehead.  _ It's time now,  _ she would whisper against my hair,  _ to take this story into your dreams and let it play out there instead. _

I wake with a start. The sliver of the thumbnail moon through the curtains is tickling the edges of night painted over everything, and I blink into the dark as I catch my breath. 

_ Take this story into your dreams and let it play out there instead. _

"Shit," I whisper aloud—my throat is hoarse as sand and I reach blindly for the water glass on my bedside table only to nearly upend it. 

Dreams. What the bloody fuck are they good for anyways?

The radiator hums pleasantly as I catch my breath, the unique windedness of unbelonging still thick in my chest from being thrown so suddenly into waking. Away from  _ what _ exactly I can hardly recall, although my heart is racing and I realize with another sip of water that my hands are trembling, and it takes just one more moment of thought...one more moment for me to stretch my mind backward and—

_ "Fuck." _

I shut my eyes, which is immediately a mistake as I remember exactly what had shocked me out of sleep. I had been dreaming, somewhat of a rarity now that I'm through with school and my only real anxiety is making it from moon to moon without too many blunders along the way on a path paved with Sirius Black's charity, and  _ there's _ the fucking crux of it. 

In the past four months of us finally finding a flat big enough for the both of us, through all the dovetailing and rip-tearing of meshing our dailies together as we have, I've had to face the uncomfortable and wholly inconvenient fact that not only am I hopelessly attracted to Sirius—because no, the cosmic joke of my life couldn't simply stop there, could it? I, someone for whom casual touch is perhaps the deepest show of affection I've ever known, am living with a man who touches as though it's his second language. Or I suppose in this case third. Or fourth? We never did decide if Sirius' bastardization of Italian profanities could be considered fluency. 

No matter. The short of it is that since we've moved into this flat, I'm constantly feeling as though I'm about to either jump out of my skin with latent and untapped adoration or jump Sirius Black's bones the next time he sets a hand on the small of my back when he passes me in the gods-be-damned kitchen. 

The long of it, in not so many words, is that I'm constantly hashing through this all in the depth of my subconscious. I've dreamt of tangling myself up in Sirius and kissing the life out of him for five—no, six nights running now. 

"Fuck," I hiss to myself again, dropping my chin to my chest and taking several deep breaths. The afterburn of dreams has never left me easily, and I feel it all now like the impression of the sun on the backs of my eyes after staring at the sky for far too long; the smell of him, the feel of his hair in my fingers, the taste of him,  _ Christ _ but the taste of him. The barest touch of cinnamon toothpaste, tea tannins, those fucking cloves he smokes like the absolute Mary he is—I toss my head, exhausted. "Fuck."

I stare at the wall across from the foot of my bed as though I might bore my sight through to the sanctuary of Sirius' bedroom, the place itself like a grotto full of untouched things I crave to have but for which I will never let myself wish. We smoke weed in there together when Sirius gets the itch to get high with me every now and again, if nothing else for the open pair of ears for all the proselytizing he does for the Sex Pistols when he isn't sober—he knows I'll just ignore him if he does it usually, and I'm happy to oblige if it means I get to watch him unspool like that—and the chance I get to hunker down into the glory of the jumpers he leaves in a pile on the chair I always take when we're in there. 

_ Moony, _ Sirius has said to me before, stretched out long across his unmade bed with the spliff held so easily it looks like a sixth digit on his hand,  _ we really did give 'em all the what-for, didn't we? _

_ Who?  _ I asked, my knees drawn up and my fingers wound around each other as I let Sirius take his sweet time with the smoke even though I hadn't even taken my first pull of it yet. 

_ Everyone,  _ he said with a devilish twist of a smile as he sucked deep on his last drag before holding it in, passing it to me as I fastidiously avoided staring at the recurve bow of his mouth;  _ look at us,  _ he breathed on his exhale, wonderment abounding through the middle-low of his voice, _ the disowned nellie and the werewolf, kipping off and finding our own chance at some bloody fucking peace after all.  _

I had taken a draw of smoke so punishingly deep to stay my bleeding heart that I nearly sent myself into a coughing fit, but I managed to hold it in with nothing to betray me but a very faint trace of watering in my eyes. I shrugged and held on for a few seconds past my comfort level to make sure I wouldn't burst with longing before exhaling.  _ I think we make one hell of a pair. _

Had I been more intent then on honesty and had Sirius not been several leagues away in his own contentment, the depth of my definition of  _ pair _ might have hit with the weight of the truth I had intended beneath my cowardice. 

But, when all is said and done, I am a man made of contradictions and will probably never let myself have beautiful things without a good fair fight for it. Although, I try to tell myself as I burrow back down into my sheets to try chasing sleep again through its own dregs, I've been fighting myself on this one since I was 13 years old and no part of it has ever been fair. 

A dog outside barks in someone's distant alley. I think briefly on a plague-me-to-sleep wank, but the risk of the shapes of Sirius saturating my imagination right now stays my hand. 

_ "Fuck,"  _ I murmur again, and I mean it— _ fuck me, fuck this, fuck you, fuck off.  _ I can't win. I can never win. 

Deep in the amygdalar knots of my memories, I fall asleep again for the scant remaining hours before dawn to the wraith of Sirius' hands on my waist in a place that feels like unmade and hallowed paradise. 

—

"Did you know," Sirius announces, not looking up from the massive Muggle encyclopedia for the letter E unfolded across the bandy riot of his knees on the sofa, "that the word 'entropy' was only invented about eighty years ago?"

We do this nearly every night now, spending at least an hour or two on our overstuffed monstrosity of a sofa with a book or a magazine for each of us while a record spins across the room. We found the couch in a rickety secondhand shop outside of Brighton—painfully magical—and the books in my parents’ combined chaos of a storage unit back in Kent—painfully, beautifully, ironically Muggle. Da was all too happy to push them off on me when he saw the way Sirius’ eyes lit up at the hideous stacks of texts and tomes collecting dust when we were over to take some old furniture to the new flat. Berk.

I hum in blithe recognition, my nerves concentrated tightly on the join of my fingers where I'm holding my cigarette very carefully above the ashtray on the coffee table. _ Did you know,  _ I think to myself with the tension of all those thousands of leagues of disconnect from such a stunning dream still rioting along tucked into the flats of my blood, _ I dreamt of kissing you last night, so deeply and fully that I couldn't tell where either of us began or ended?  _ I look up from my own book to pause the cantering prose of  _ Faust _ mid-sentence. "Was it now?" I say simply, the truth trapped behind my teeth like brambles. 

Sirius turns the page, not looking up at me, and nods to himself with a tiny notch sprung up between the dark statements of his brows. He has the tip of his tongue held between the seam of his lips in concentration as he always has done since we were boys. I stop myself from imagining I could lean over and touch it with my own. "From Oxford: Entropy," he recites, a low and studious tone padding his voice—I curl my knees in more tightly toward myself as he unconsciously reaches out and begins playing his fingers on the back collar seam of my jumper, those restless fingers of his benign and unexpected, wholly blessed but never meaning more than a simple idleness between us—"a lack of order or predictability; gradual decline into disorder."

The compulsion to shout  _ Aha! Everything you've been doing to me with that maddening habit of yours for years—touching, touching, always fucking touching  _ roots itself very sharply behind my breastbone, but I force myself to take several slow breaths to keep it away. I draw steadily on my cigarette again, careful to pull my eyes back down to the page open before me and not let them wander up to pick at Sirius' gaze until he looks back at me as I've lately been wishing he might—but what is  _ lately _ anyways when it's been the norm for the last six years?—and sit a very calculated smirk on the corner of my mouth. "What a good sprog, learning your words  _ so  _ nicely, aren't you?"

He looks up at me then and I can feel that good-natured glare so I look up as well, daring myself to do it and not tumble further into infatuation but of course I fail; that perfect purplish slate-grey hits me directly in the heart, squeezes like iron bands, and refuses to let go.  _ But you will never know another's heart, unless you are prepared to give yours too— _ I shut my book to stay the bleed of Goethe into my deeper reaches alongside every syllable of Sirius' existence, all it feels I've got room for anyways, and pull a face that feels like it might challenge his frown well enough. 

"Fuck off." Sirius' words are ever crisp, and they split across a broad grin like eggshell yielding to the gold pour of yolk. "It's not a dictionary, you know. I could read about anything in here."

I shift, wanting to perhaps shake off the burning presence of his hand on my neck, but either by an inner resistance to moving away from him or Sirius' own bloody-minded stubbornness I do nothing but move Sirius' touch nearer to the hair that skims the nape of my neck. "Anything that starts with E, mind you, you're shit out of luck if you need facts about trees," I reply as I slide my own book onto the table and re-fold my legs. I take another shallow draw of smoke. 

With a flourish, Sirius flips through the heavy pages and slaps his forefinger down onto a passage at random. He squints briefly at the text before looking back up at me with a sly smile, and had I a shred of shame left in any of my inner reaches I might be embarrassed at how quickly my own smile chases in to match it. "Here," Sirius asserts, proud and oratory as though he has a king's speech unfurled on his knees instead of one of my father's hideously outdated paperweights, "would you like to learn about  _ elms _ ?"

I shift sideways to face him in quiet surrender and want, vaguely and only for a moment, for the sort of talent that might draw my dreams up into reality before me as though weaving a story into the page.  _ I would like to kiss you, _ I tell myself, for if I waste the words on someone who isn't Sirius perhaps I might forget the need to offer them to him instead. His fingers twist, curled softly in repose as though they've always belonged there against my skin, and I resist the urge to lean my head into his touch and beg for more of Sirius' warmth. "Touché," I settle for murmuring as the Sunday quiet built up around us hums along unawares; "but I think I'm more of an oak man myself."

Sirius rolls his eyes and I take my cue to lean forward to roll another cigarette. The back of my neck burns vaguely in absence as Sirius' hand slips away, tingling with far too much sweetness to be anything common—a very slow dissolving against my steel-shod resistance, sure to destroy me in the long-run.  _ There _ , I think somewhere in the back corner of my deepest red and most secreted wishes as I lick tidily along the paper's edge,  _ there’s your fucking entropy. _

—

I should hardly find the way someone makes tea something worthy of very much attention, but I am nothing if not a disappointment to my own expectations. 

He makes tea, I decide as I surreptitiously watch Sirius from across the narrow span of the kitchen sink, like one might expect someone to prepare an oblation to the god of comfortable things. 

"You know," he says over his shoulder with that lofty throw of energy that hangs off of him like robes of high noon sun on the eaves of broad daylight, "for someone with such a sick sense of humor, you take your tea with a fuckload of sugar."

I snort, bodily yanking myself from the soppy imagery of Sirius bathed in gold and crowned with garland after garland. Raising an eyebrow across the counter as I rinse my breakfast dish, I fix him with a look. "What does my taste in irony have to do with my taste in tea?"

Sirius glances shortly at me, just enough of a look for me to catch the briefest slice of his eyes—a flash of steel out of the scabbard, a laughing knife if there ever was one—and shrugs before turning back to the two mugs before him. I showed him the ritual of Muggle tea brewing once at James' flat last year with Lily's kettle as she'd just begun very carefully winding their lives together there, and Sirius has been addicted to the calm rote of it since. Leave it to a disgraced heir to find peace in the unseen corners of plainest existence. 

"I dunno, I just find it silly that someone who laughed at a gaggle of fourth years getting sick off the astronomy tower from overdoing it on the Firewhiskey also enjoys  _ four sugars _ in his tea." As if accenting his point, Sirius drops four sugar cubes into one mug with precise little flicks— _ plink, plink, plink, plink. _ When I don't give him the satisfaction of responding, he leans a hand on the counter and turns to face me with one hip cocked at that low-jut, Bowie-strut angle of his. Lord, but he gives a good shit-eating grin. "That 'someone' is you, in case you're not just pretending to be thick. And a prefect at the time, no less, weren't you?"

Rolling my eyes distracts me well enough away from the curve of Sirius' smile. "They had it coming," I insist with a sneer that feels a touch past toshy. Sirius' brow creases, good-natured but insistent, as he keeps looking at me while the kettle builds to its boil beside the toaster.

"You're in a mood," he says simply. I roll my eyes again before I sense the repetition and stop it, but by then Sirius has caught victory between his teeth and is grinning again. "What," he continues, turning to the cabinets to pluck at the teabags—my heart flexes just a little for the break, the relief from his exacting and glimmering stare—"is there a second moon due round this month? You're quite cagey lately."

_ "Cagey?"  _ I shut the tap and dry my hands as the kettle continues its rise, the low growl of water taking heat feeling very much like the gripping pressure in between my lungs at the nearness of Sirius right now. Perhaps he's right; perhaps I'm being a bit too sharp-edged, but then how would I go about filing those bits down if not by cracking open my ribs and splaying out every inch of my heart meat to him in offering? I lean my own hip against the counter and cross my arms. "I am not," I lie with catastrophic inaccuracy, "being  _ cagey." _

Sirius makes a small sound at the back of his throat and shuts one cabinet as he opens another. "Call it what you will, it's out of the ordinary."

"What would you consider ordinary?" I feel as though I'm balancing very carefully on a string threaded between two high points, wind buffeting my sides, and I'll be fine as long as I don't look down—Sirius only shrugs, still pawing at the insides of the cabinets. 

"I dunno, Remus, not… _ cagey, _ that's for sure. Where the fuck are the cardamom biscuits?"

I draw breath to give him a self-righteous  _ You ate them all last week when you and Pete got blind drunk— _ sideways hitch of my smile all ready to go on the edge of my mouth, chin tipped slightly to one side, expression twisted into the unique and rueful pleasure only Sirius can drum up with maddening regularity—but then of course Sirius Black throws me for one hell of a loop. 

He reaches up to try the cabinet above me just as the kettle clicks off, a sound like a metallic little gasp in the quiet of the kitchen underscored only by the hiss of The Runaways B-side left spinning on the turntable. As though his hand belongs there, as though I'm not just a flatmate, as though I'm anything beyond a friend or a body taking up space or an absolute nuisance on my worst days, Sirius' touch meets my lower back in counterbalance while he goes up on tip-toe to peer into the empty shelf. 

I freeze. I barely manage not to audibly gasp. If I'm keeping with the tightrope metaphor, this is where I look down and the thread beneath my feet snaps with the smallest little  _ twang _ in the great blue yawn of the open air. 

It's always, I realize as I feel my insides light like a short and explosive wick, when I least expect it that Sirius' touch ruins me with such quiet glory. 

"Oh, fucking tit-bollocks," Sirius mutters to himself with his face still tipped up to the cupboard as his hand sits in obstinate warmth against my waist, "I ate them all with Pete after we went to Friar's last week, didn't I?"

I almost can't hear him properly through the fog of shrieking presence that has suddenly wrapped itself tightly around my senses. Every pull of breath, tight as a hex wrapped fiercely around my throat, feels as though it scrapes through me. I try to swallow, can't, try again; a pathetic little wheeze stumbles across my tongue, and of course it's then that Sirius looks down at me. His hand still on my fucking back, he frowns. "Alright, Moony?"

"Th—your record," I blurt. I take a step back, clawing inwardly for escape from this perfect madness, and only succeed in pulling Sirius’ fingertips across the hem of my shirt as though dragging them gently through a stream. The vestiges of wolven hunger, latent for a fortnight, suddenly feel dangerously close to the threshold of the gaps between my teeth.

Sirius screws his face into the very picture of bewilderment. “What?”

Flailing one open hand at the turntable, I finally break from his touch with another step backward that bunts me into the edge of the refrigerator. I sputter a little, my eyebrows likely up to my hairline as I gawp at the sitting room over Sirius’ shoulder, and nod at the record cabinet. “Your record needs a flip.”

The absence of Sirius touch feels as though my skin has been flayed away, burning and numb at once, but I ignore the strange ache of it as I push past him into the sitting room. "Last I checked, you're far from a fan of that album," Sirius calls after me. 

"What are you talking about! I adore Jean." Thoughtless, manic, I don't even look at Sirius as my voice nearly cracks around my words. I flick the needle up, throwing us into a sort of hazy afternoon silence attended by the hum of the dishwasher and the mutter of traffic outside the window beside me, and flip the record with far more focus than should be necessary. I only glance up again when  _ Queens Of Noise _ is several seconds into its unrelenting, double-step march of noise—about which Sirius is painfully, absolutely correct regarding my opinion. He’s squinting at me.

“Joan,” he hums.

I cross my arms, desperate and grateful at once for something that feels like a shield going up before my heart. “What?”

“Her name isn’t Jean,” Sirius clarifies as he finally turns back to the tea—takes that stare, takes those eyes, takes that searing attention of his with him whether he knows the power of his presence or not—and gently pours the water, “it’s  _ Joan.” _

I’m about to say something terribly snarky, I can feel it; can’t even decide what it’s about to be but hell if it isn’t brewing on my tongue, when Sirius sweeps past me and presses the second warm mug into my hands without warning. Our fingers skim on the handle. All I can do to keep from coming apart at my seams there in front of the records is stare at the vague shape of the fourth sugar cube dissolving into its last particle against the tea’s murky film.

“You’re in a mood,” Sirius murmurs again.  _ If he doesn’t move, I’m going to kiss him. _

I sip from the tea with a shallow slurp but don’t move an inch, still staring straight ahead into the kitchen. I shake my head once. “Am not.”  _ If he doesn’t fucking move, I’m going to fucking kiss him. _

Something skitters across the midday light pouring in along the floorboards, over the edges of the faded persian rug we smuggled out of the pub in Eton last summer, and I nearly lean over and seize it—although that would take courage, wouldn’t it? That would take conviction and bravery and a special sort of something I don’t and likely won’t ever have scrawled along the straits of my marrow, so I simply tip my shoulder back to get but an inch more space between myself and Sirius. 

The moment breaks like the last granule of sugar in hot water. “Am not,” I repeat. My voice catches. Sirius’ eyes flash.

“Sure.” 

I blink, and in that instant Sirius has turned away and is flopping down onto the sofa as he paws the carton of cigarettes out of his back pocket. I sip from the tea again, carelessly as my mind cottons full of white noise, and burn the tip of my tongue.

_ You gave me the answer, _ the record wails,  _ now I got the answer, oh yeah… _

_ Oh no, _ I rather think to myself as I give up. Stalking to my bedroom, I shut the door gently behind me as I take a far more careful sip from the mug; it’s infuriating, really, that the tea is delicious.  _ Oh fucking no. _

—

Normally I’m not so fussy about Sirius having exactly five-point-one centimeters on my height.

Normally I’m not trying to reach the top of the linen closet, but unfortunately Sirius cocked up the order in which I usually keep the shelves last time he washed his towels.

I could use a charm to get my sheets down, but it’s really a matter of pride at this point.

“You could use a charm, you know.”

_ Speak of the devil himself, _ I manage not to crow as Sirius stops in the join of the hall and the sitting room on his way out of the bath. He's glisten-damp, the complex performance of washing and perfuming his hair twice-weekly just past behind the hour-long hiss of the pelt and steam of the shower, and of bloody course he isn't wearing a shirt. I don't let myself do more than glance at him before I bury myself back in the linens, a flush burning hot on the back of my neck. "No."

"Have I ever told you," Sirius says with a good-natured sneer, "how amazing I think it is that you get  _ more _ stubborn in the face of good advice?"

He leans against the edge of the linen closet, too close and not nearly close enough all at once, his arms crossed along his chest. He smells faintly of the hard-water tang of the pipes and more overwhelmingly of lavender and patchouli, the heady mix of it that he still buys from Fleamont at family discount, his face freshly shaved and one sleek eyebrow raised at me. It's the sort of hypothetical to which he actually expects an answer. I scowl at the rolled stack of towels before me. "I myself find it amazing that you think your advice is objectively good," I snap. 

Sirius snorts, tilting his head at my failed tiptoes-hop-grab maneuver that only succeeds in knocking the stack of my sheets to the far edge of the shelf. He doesn't make any move to help. "What the fuck crawled up your arse, Remus?"

_ "What?"  _ Spinning to face Sirius, I squint so sharply I feel I might also accidentally try to raise my hackles or curl my top lip back over my teeth. He pulls a face, a  _ There, See There _ sort of face, and doesn't say anything for a moment. I deflate slightly, thorns still out but dulled somewhat, clenching my nails into my palm where the dull bite of them feels like at least a bit of penance. "What," I amend, my voice more measured, corralled into a pen. 

"Look." Sirius steps forward and, to my quiet horror, reaches up easily while still so near to me. "I'm not trying to be a combative dick. Out of everyone we know, I like bickering with you the least."

I try to swallow as my throat goes dry when Sirius stretches to grab at the linens, graceful as a summer breeze, the long column of his side bunching and moving like my dreams come alive before me. "Thanks," I manage to wheeze. Thankfully—or tragically, depending on how one might think I'm expecting this exchange to go—Sirius construes it as a dry retort. He's grinning to himself when he comes back down to flat feet with my sheets in hand and doesn't yet make a move to hand them over. 

"Come on, Moony, what's going on in that head of yours?"

There's such honesty in those clever eyes of his, standing there in just his flannel shorts with my bedsheets held in the crook of his arm, that I almost break to it.  _ You, _ I want to shout,  _ it's always and only ever will be you _ , as I grab him by that maddeningly fragrant hair of his and crush him close to finally taste him for myself. I blink, dispelling the thought like a bad itch. "It's nothing," I mumble. 

As though it's a peace offering, Sirius extends my sheets between us. I look down at the tidy stack before glancing back up at him—his own gaze still seems to be testing for weaknesses in my defenses, prying gently, and were I made of stronger stock I would open right up to it. But I look back down at the sheets in those enviable hands of his before I can buckle to such sweet damage. "Remus," Sirius says gently, and I do not look up; "you're my best mate, yeah? I'm living with you for a reason. I already know your big fucking secret and I'm still here, aren't I?"

A wry smile twists my mouth and the words at there at the brook of my lips— _ You know A big fucking secret but not THE big fucking secret, you beautiful idiot.  _ I want to reach forward and embrace him, bury my nose in the join of his collarbone and inhale until I can't breathe. I want to drop to my knees and worship him there in the hall. I want to kiss him until my mouth leaves pathways on every olive-brown crest of his skin. I want, I want, I want. 

"It's nothing," I repeat, finality wrapped tightly around every syllable. I look up at him with my stoniest walls built up behind my stare and let the dryness of my small grin sap up any risk of affection that might be bleeding along my irises. I reach out to take the sheets and nearly drop them when Sirius catches me gently around the wrist. 

"There it is again; you're so bloody stubborn," he murmurs fiercely, "you pick and choose what you think you're afraid of sharing, but at the end of the day I hope you know it's nothing I can't handle."

His eyes shimmer with something I can't place, but I’m not able to look for longer than a moment. My heart in my throat, I nudge past him and try to ignore the sweetness of his bare arm brushing along mine. "Thank you," I manage to toss over my shoulder before heeling my bedroom door shut solidly behind me. 

Standing in the center of my room, catching my breath as though I've just run from something horrible, I clutch the sheets to my chest. I stare at my stripped-bare bed for a long moment with unbidden loneliness rising in my chest. The fresh sheets are soft and cool when I dip my face into them and inhale lightly, hoping to catch some trace of Sirius, but all I get is the faint hint of detergent. 

"Hopeless," I whisper to myself. Absolutely hopeless, I make my bed the Muggle way to the tune of white noise in my mind—hissing, incessant, and nothing close to the twisting harmonies of Sirius whatsoever. 

—

I’ve a blessed stretch of several Sirius-less hours this evening, although depending on which corner of myself you ask it’s either  _ blessed _ or  _ absolutely horrid, who let you be by yourself, get that gorgeous shit back here this instant. _ He and James have a few pints together twice a month, brothers only, and it’s a very likely seven-in-ten chance that Sirius arrives home pissed as a drowned skink once one of them gets too tired to order another round.

For the past three days I've been wrapped up in a haze of self-imposed blandness, shunting anything that feels like passion straight out of my body lest I crack under its surge and melt into Sirius.  _ You can't have him, _ I tell myself each day,  _ he is so close but you cannot have him. _ Every laugh of mine is half-hearted, every smile falls short, and every time Sirius looks at me I feel him trying to puzzle me apart. It must be fairly vexing, but he can take care of himself. We're adults here, as childish as all my avoidance might feel sometimes. But I can look after myself. 

It’s just past one o’clock in the morning when the floo blazes emerald, startling me up out of my half-dozed fog in the middle of  _ The House of the Dead _ with what feels like every blanket in the flat wrapped up around my knees. I’m lucky I didn’t have a chance to truly drift off, as last night’s dreams were more of the same—Sirius’ touch, Sirius’ smell, Sirius concentrated at every space between my joints—and it might very well be catastrophic to be faced with him in waking while still shaking off the cobwebs of his existence in dreamspace.

My heart picks up a tick, high in my throat, and I will it back down as best I can as the flames and soot clear into the air;  _ We need to dust the fucking floo. _

“Here then, you’re not asleep yet?”

Sirius is grinning that wide, doggy smile of his as he steps out of the hearth, charming his boots clean with a vague toss of a spell that shouldn’t be half as alluring as it feels to watch. I shut my book, the brick of a thing, and set it heavily on the floor at my feet. It's difficult to hold in a yawn but I do my best to keep it reigned; “Nearly,” I relent. My jaw pops faintly.

Without asking, jacket still on and smelling stark-sweet of nicotine and well-loved leather, Sirius sits heavily beside me and slings one arm over the back of the sofa. “James is well,” he says, unprompted as though he knows I was just about to ask after James, and in the silence of my mind skipping a rung and trying to clamor up the next thing to say in its stead, Sirius calmly plucks up the cigarette tucked behind his ear and lights it with one thumb and forefinger.

I rub one eye with the heel of my hand and hold in another yawn. “How’s Lily?”

“Oh, shit,” Sirius gasps—the cigarette sticks to his bottom lip and wiggles a little as his whips his face over to me, pinning me with such unbridled happiness that it shocks me sharply into starker waking. “Did I tell you she’s pregnant?”

I can’t help but let a hapless little chuckle trip through my nose. “Yes, Sirius, you told me last month.”

Sirius relaxes back into the couch and crosses one ankle onto his knee. I try not to stare at the buckles of his boots kissing the hem of those fucking stone-wash jeans of his, and I think I only succeed about halfway. I’m too tired to know for sure how much attention I’m giving all of Sirius’ details at the moment and just awake enough to be quietly mortified.  _ Brilliant. _

“Fucking weird, that is,” Sirius mutters to himself. He takes an indolent drag on the cigarette and shakes his head very slightly, staring at nothing above the mantle. “Pregnant Lily.”

I snort. “I’m more gobsmacked by James as a  _ father.” _

A sharp bray of a laugh vaults out of Sirius, bouncing off the ceiling and back down into the carpet, before he lays his happy-drunk head on his arm and smiles at me. I barely manage not to recoil at the serenity of it. “ _ That’s _ right terrifying.”

Were this any other night, one of us would have carried on with the thread of vaguely horrific things that James Potter siring a child might bring up—the idea of James trying to teach anything how to walk, or attempting to change a nappy, or even just  _ holding _ the damn thing—but this isn’t a normal night in this fucking pressure cooker of a flat. Not for the first time, I wonder if I’m the only one who feels the temperature rising just beneath my skin. Not for the first time, Sirius sighs while he looks at me.

“What.”  _ Shit, _ I bite it out slightly more than I mean to.

“Be honest with me, really fucking honest,” Sirius drawls, his voice gentle but scored by the ever-present gravel against its timbre— _ ’S all the barking, _ he’s joked before, or only half-joked—“what’s got you lately?”

I have precisely three seconds to reply before the pause gets awkward and I’m just exhausted enough not to dig too deeply for subterfuge, so I give my own little sigh and grab Sirius’ cigarette for a quick drag before I put it back between his fingers and exhale a thin thread of smoke.  _ You're my best mate, _ I hear him say again from the other day in the linen closet, and the idea of lying to him again curdles my very blood. I shift in my seat to make myself just a titch smaller. “You,” I manage to admit, just barely.

Sirius’ eyes go a bit wide at that, true surprise lighting through the quicksilver of his irises.  _ “Me?” _

Frustration reaches up and clenches around my sternum, and I’m in thrall to it as I let out a little scoff into the midnight quiet built up in the creaky prewar eaves shouldering the rest of the walkup around us.  _ Sounds about right,  _ they seem to creak as the last several weeks of mounting bullshit burst and come pouring forth over my tongue like molten steel; "Oh, don’t tell me you don’t know exactly what you’re doing.”

“Excuse me?” Picking his head up from his arm, Sirius frowns at me with the slightly owlish inability to focus that comes with upwards of six pints and Merlin knows how many whiskey chasers. “Praytell, messire Moony, what is it that I’m ‘exactly doing’?”

“You—!” A bereft little puff of air is all that leaves my mouth beyond what I had hoped was the beginning of something very eloquent and forthright and all-around bitingly accurate.  _ Fuck. _ I wet my lips quickly, nervously, and try again; “You don’t—get it, do you? I don't think you ever  _ have. _ ”

_ Cheers, Remus, top-tier fucking wit. _

Sirius watches me flatly, still frowning, for several agonizing moments before he takes another draw on his cigarette. “Right,” he says slowly, “I don’t think the fact ‘m not getting this is because I’m pissed.”

I tip my head backward against the back of the sofa and groan as I swipe both hands over my face. “No, I’m just fucking useless right now, I’m—”

“You’re not  _ useless,” _ Sirius insists, so softly I nearly believe him.

“See, that right there is it!”

“What, you thinking you’re useless?”

_ “No, _ you nonce, all of your—your  _ insistence _ on just...fucking  _ being there!” _

The comfortable quiet dissolves somewhat around the heft of my words, clumsy things that they are, trundling out into the sitting room and bungling up the space between Sirius and I. I feel him wilt a bit, pull back by the barest fraction of an inch that I feel like a chasm, and watch me intently as he takes one last drag of smoke before spelling the rest of his cigarette into the air with a twist of his fingers. “‘S my flat too,” he murmurs simply.

I shut my eyes and take a steady breath. “I know,” I hazard, eyes still shut, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that.”

“How d’you mean it then?”

Every blessed way I might be able to let Sirius know how deeply he rattles my very being surges up to the surface of my mind;  _ I can’t quit thinking about you even when you’re not home, perish the thought of a moment of peace when you’re next to me, _ or  _ Any time I feel your hand on me I want to rattle out of my skin and Apparate somewhere very, very far away and maybe take you with me, _ or even  _ I can’t quit thinking about the way my dreams think you taste, and nothing you do is keeping me away from acting on that. _

I open my eyes again as though the ugly landscape painting from Peter’s mum’s attic has any answers, but the wall-eyed cow in its pasture is mute as ever. Unfortunate. I could use some bovine wisdom at present, goodness knows it would be more heartfelt than anything I might be able to drum up myself. 

Mustering courage, I shift and tuck one leg up to turn and face Sirius fully. I decide that the truth may as well make itself known after all. “You’re always...touching me.” Brambles, brambles, brambles, it's all fucking brambles in my mouth, and it's so hard to look at Sirius but I keep fucking looking because I owe myself at least that much for six-odd years of needing him like oxygen.

Sirius, the utter bastard, shrugs. “‘Course I am, this flat’s a fucking broom closet.”

Doing my best to hold back the ferocity of the flat glare that begs to burst out of my expression, I purse my lips. “You know what I mean, Sirius.”

“Do I?”  _ Goddammit, _ he’s grinning that catch-me-if-you-can grin of his and I’m a nancy made of wet paper who might as well be rolling over at his feet. I rest my head sideways against the back of the couch again, careful not to touch his hand where it rests, and give him my best pleading look.

“I’m not particularly used to it,” I admit slowly.

“And how’s that?”

I shut my eyes quickly when his fingers wander over and find my hair just as I’d half-feared they would from so near, that automatic pull towards me like an incessant and disastrous orbit—two planets careening toward one another, heedless of the universe around them, ready to burst into cataclysmic glory. “Just like that,” I whisper—too delicate, too bare, too obvious. But I can't take it back. I count the stretch of silence on its tail, footsteps in sand, and wait for Sirius' voice again.

He sniffs a laugh to himself, softer than lambswool in the safe dark of my eyelids. “Try again, then,” Sirius dares me, and  _ good fucking lord, _ I would commit every sort of crime for the color of his voice right now, “what’s got you, Moony?”

Railing against my insides like a mad dog, I lean into his touch as my heartbeat thunders behind my birdcage ribs;  _ danger, danger, this is danger. _ "The way you touch me," I finally murmur, my voice sticking to my throat, "makes me doubt how much I hate myself."

Sirius shifts with a whisper of leather and long hair and leans into me, the notes of drink on his breath almost sharp enough to taste—I open my eyes and he smiles very gently, pinning me with a stare of ether-bright challenge. "And why would that be a bad thing?"

I chew my lip unconsciously as nerves rattle to a canter between the bones of my wrists. "Because." I pause, the words breaking a little at their corners where I hold them desperately, fruitlessly between my teeth. "If I'm wrong about that, there's...fuck, Sirius, there's so much fucking else I've been lying to myself about."

"Moony, Moony, Moony,” Sirius croons, and I swear I can feel my heart stop as he leans forward and nuzzles his nose against my neck. "You deserve good things, y'know."

Swallowing thick around emotion and unsurety and the utter pain of what I  _ know _ is denial deep in the cherry stone of my heart’s core, I shake my head. My voice trembles when I make a small sound of doubt. “Good of you to think, but no.”

Sirius’ breath feels so right, so warm, so hallowed-hot along my throat that it’s a hard-won effort to keep my mouth from falling open and accepting the host of his all-encompassing existence. Because that’s it, really, when I give myself the space to think of it; Sirius Black is everything I could never, can never be; boundless, free to face the rapids of mortality headlong, not fettered back against the charred wall of a curse that will chase him until the day he dies. I hold back the very surprising press of tears against the backs of my eyes by squeezing them shut when he kisses me once, feather-light, against the sprinting pulse just under the corner of my jaw. “‘S not just a thought,” he whispers against my skin. I nearly dissolve.

The tip of his nose, searching and purposeful, slips softly up to bring his lips to where my earlobe meets the hollow of my skull. I think for just a moment that I’m letting this happen, I’m going to finally allow myself the end to all the desperate, reaching hope that has plagued me since I was a boy—notwithstanding the fact that Sirius Black just kissed me, right on the neck, nevermind the fact he’s pissed, nevermind the fact it’s nearly the witching hour anyways so why not—

“No.”

It’s as though I’ve just spoken shattered glass, the word burns all the way up— _ No,  _ a pinhole straight to the aorta of suspended perfection just beginning to unravel in my own fucking flat, so sharp that the moment bleeds out in an instant. Sirius freezes and pulls back, just an inch. I realize my hand is clenched tightly around one lapel of his jacket.

“Was that alright?” Sirius asks carefully, as though he’s done something terrible. I shake my head sharply, before I catch myself and switch it to a sloppy nod. My eyes still shut, a wry laugh coughs out on a burble of air.

“I don’t know, it—I can’t,” I barely choke out. I stagger into a stand, nearly trip over Dostoyevsky, flex my hand open-shut, open-shut as though the movement might wipe away the memory in my palm now of pressing fast to the edge of Sirius' jacket. "I'm sorry," I wheeze, hand to my forehead, trying madly not to cry. 

"Here, 's alright, come sit, Remus, really—"

" _ No,  _ Sirius, I—can't, please, you—" I stop myself, biting on the edge of one shaking hand— _ stop this, stop it, forget it right now _ —and nearly lose my hold on my emotions when I see the depth of Sirius' confusion swimming in that storm-grey stare, looking up while he pats once at the couch cushion. I give it one more breath, two more, and toss my head sharply. "I'm sorry," I blurt again, and then I'm turning on my heel and barreling toward my bedroom as though the door is going to shut on me for good if I don't reach it in time. 

"Remus," Sirius calls once more, and my name is so full of tenderness in his mouth that I might have turned back around had I not the unfortunate disposition of closing my own steel trap teeth around my legs.  _ He's just pissed,  _ a small voice in my gut reminds me, and I take the last step over my threshold and shut the door firmly behind me. 

I hear a very faint murmur of Sirius hissing an oath or two to himself, and I'm quite sure he ends up sleeping on the couch if the rustles of fabric and slurred spells to shut the lights are anything to go by. Crouched against my door on the floor, curled in a tight ball, I spend several hours steeped in my own fucking misery. I watch for the light beneath his door across the hall in solitary desperation, but for what I can't fathom; to creep over and knock? To whisper the achy stories of my truth-fucked heart beneath the jamb? To simply crawl out and lie against it, sleep on the cold floor and pretend I'm anywhere near his arms?

It's folly. It's all fucking folly. 

When I do dream, an hour or so later and tangled in my sheets like thorned vines, they are ugly things made of bruise-purple haze and not a trace of Sirius within. 

—

I lie awake the next morning for a long time, terrified of facing Sirius in the sitting room if he's still there. The man can sleep through noon and straight on til supper in the thick of his most impressive hangovers, and something tells me this one is bound to be ruthless. 

I've spent at least two hours replaying the envelope of last night through my mind's eye, both examining and desperately reliving the feeling of Sirius Black kissing me of his own volition. Obviously I've spun up the scenario six ways 'til Sunday, but nothing was ever so staggering as the truth of it last night—delicate as anything, painfully intimate and almost too tender to bear, his lips against my pulse as though sewing encouragement into my blood—"Fuck," I murmur into the morning calm. I drop my head toward my bedside clock, fingers tangled in my hair; eight o'clock. 

The sigh that leaves me could lift a corsair out to sea. On one hand, I want to hide from Sirius until I turn to dust. On the other, I really need to use the loo. 

I wrestle into a jumper and the cleanest pair of trousers piled on the floor at the foot of my bed.  _ Buck up, buttercup,  _ I hear booming through my head, the jeer of the boy who lived down the street from Da when I was still a kid and hadn't yet given up on trying to make friends.  _ Buck up _ indeed. As Sirius said, it's my fucking flat too. 

Cracking open my door as silently as I can, I’m relieved at the same time as stabbed with a little pang of something that feels like regret when I see Sirius’ bedroom door shut tight against the morning. I tiptoe into the hall and glance out to the sitting room, my heart steeled as if for battle, and let out a silent breath when I see the couch empty as well. So he’s out for an uncharacteristically early breakfast or migrated to his own bed sometime in the night. Either way, I tread lightly.

Sometime halfway through brushing my teeth, I decide I should probably take a walk.

I leave the flat as quickly as the thought came to me—wand in my belt loop, jacket on to fend off the sticky-cool springtime morning, no note left for Sirius and who’s to care, he’ll sleep all day if I let him so I bloody well will,  _ Christ, _ why am I angry? Pinching alight one of the cigarettes left drying out in my breast pocket as the pavement begins scraping beneath my quick clip of a walk, I decide it’s because I’m an idiot. Sirius is an idiot. We’re both fucking idiots.

The neighborhood passes me in early morning calm, me in my bullshit fog while the rest of everything seems to carry on perfectly well. I want to bang on the windows of every shop that’s beginning to open, grab every pedestrian by the collar and shake them, shouting  _ Do you know I would burn the world down for him?! Is it scrawled across my face yet, written into all the lines in my skin, how much I adore Sirius Black?! _

I don’t stop walking until I reach the shore of the little pond just beyond the town square. Several families and a few Saturday folk are milling about, feeding the ducks, drinking their tea or their coffee or munching on their breakfast on the benches scattered around. The church a few boroughs away tolls nine, and I figure I may as well waste the rest of the morning out here if I’m just going to be boiling alive in my own thoughts regardless.

Wasting two more hours goes quite quickly—threaded through the lives of another cigarette, a shot-and-a-half of espresso, a loop or three around the pond, and up and down the hill to the top of town several times, the morning wears on more smoothly than I would have expected. I find myself perking up to count the bell tolling its eleventh ring from a low slouch on a bench with the sun beginning to warm the back of my neck like a persistent panting dog.

I think of Sirius then, with the whole dog business, and my gut pulls. If he’s awake, I should make sure he doesn’t remember coming home last night. If he’s not awake, I might be able to practice a silent Obliviate before he wakes up.

It takes another several lengths of sidewalk under my feet to convince myself I don't want to hex the memory of Sirius kissing me out of either of our memories. It takes another few shopfronts skimming past me, their windows like brightly-framed mirrors in the reflecting morning light, to realize I want more of his lips on me in a more tangible plane than just my dreams. 

It takes until I've smoked halfway through another cigarette, abandoned it in a sudden scuff against the ground, and stopped on the front step of my building for me to finally come around to the fact that I'm in love.

I think it's taken me so long to figure because I've never ascribed the privilege of the feeling to any angle of myself. That’s the issue I've always had with the whole  _ I love you _ business, really; the potential of it feels like wearing someone else’s skin, as morbid as that is, and telling somebody about a feeling so massive surely deserves more than a flayed offering of the same three rehashed syllables. In my deeper reaches, I believe the thing I’ve always wanted to say to Sirius is much closer along the lines of  _ I always want your heart to be there when I reach out for it. _

It’s far longer than three syllables though. I’ve never been good at brevity.

I stop at the foot of the walkup stairs after quietly spelling open the front door. This antechamber between the outside and home, always quiet and almost always dark as a cave at the belly of creation itself, frees me for a moment from reeling thought. I look up at the shape of the staircase, the familiar arch of the door to the flat, and can hardly keep affection from touching every angle of my bones.

There was a passage by Clemenceau I read once that argued the walk up the stairs to a lover’s room is the most erotic experience of the heart—the anticipation of it, the buzzing hunger in the guts, the thrill of attenuation as nearness looms but still sits five, four, three steps away. I suppose it’s true as I finish the climb and pause there with my hand on the door handle, catching my breath while my heart gallops along in my chest; true, but probably less terrifying if one knows for sure the person on the other side of the door loves you as well.

I know Sirius cares about me, that’s the problem. I know he likes me, tolerates me, enjoys my company, whatever it may be. But I’ve never had the courage to discover whether or not he loves me.

_ Fuck it. _ I’m a man, and I’ve taken more on the chin than the possibility of a gentle rebuff. I take a deep breath, twist the handle, and walk into the flat.

Sirius is stood there in the kitchen, hair knotted up sloppily, shirt and jeans from last night still on, and eating peanut butter straight from the jar with a butterknife.

I refuse to admit that my spirit still soars as though he’s met me at the door in glimmering, perfect raiment.

“Morning,” he says around a lick across the flat side of the knife. He blinks at me once, twice. I shut the door behind me and nod at the jar in Sirius’ hand as though I’m not about to vibrate out of my skin.

“What’s that?”

Sirius shrugs and licks the knife again. “Breakfast.”

I lean back against the door and cross my arms, uncross them, cross them again. “Is it now?”

“You were out early,” Sirius deflects with a jut of his chin at me. It’s then I notice something bright behind his stare, something beneath the swim of that hangover for which he’s already choked downed a raw egg if the shell in the sink is any tell—he’s watching me like a hound on the point, the relaxation of his lean on the counter calculated to the very angle of his elbow at his side.

_ Shit, _ he remembers last night.

I bury my hands in my jacket pockets and shrug. I feel uncannily as though the first of us to blink might earn a pair of jaws shut around their neck so, just in case, I do not blink. "I felt like a walk."

Sirius licks up another stripe of peanut butter and nods to himself. "Had the window open earlier, seems a nice morning."

"It is, yeah." I run a hand through my hair and don't miss the way Sirius tracks my hand with hunter's eyes. A chill, equal parts adoration and resistance, shudders between my shoulder blades. I blink—Sirius' stare snaps back to mine with a flash, and in it I see surprise and confusion and a twinge of longing that I've seen in my own reflection far too many times before. I swallow. "Are you feeling alright?"

“Am—am  _ I _ feeling alright?” He points at himself with the butterknife, incredulous, and seems to crumple a little against the counter. A bitter huff of a chuckle skips out from him before he chucks the knife in the sink and sets the jar down beside him. Scrubbing both palms across his face, Sirius groans. “Remus bloody Lupin, you’re going to fucking kill me one of these days.”

I watch him, askance, and hold my ground against the door. “How’s that?”

A deep breath flows in and out of Sirius in one steady pull-push, tugging his shoulders with a soft swell before he rakes his hands back to re-tie his hair and cross one ankle of the other as he shifts his lean against the counter. He shakes his head a little, staring at a middle-distance on the kitchen floor, and runs the tip of his tongue along his lower lip. “I’m trying something new these days, you know,” he says to neither of us in particular. 

When I don’t reply, Sirius looks over at me with an unreadable sunniness in the depths of his pupils. “I’m trying,” he clarifies, “to be a little bit more  _ honest _ with myself.”

“Congratulations,” I reply tightly, my fists balled tightly in my pockets and pressed so near to the door I might melt into it if I accidentally summon the magic to help. Sirius flattens his look at me, just enough for me to catch the  _ Honestly, Moony _ pitch of it. “Sorry,” I mumble, “you talk.”

“D’you want to know what I talked about with James last night, for most of the night really, besides pregnant Lily?” Sirius watches me evenly, pausing perhaps for his own sanity as I can tell with that tightened fan of tendons on the back of his right hand that he doesn’t want me chipping in right now. “I talked about you. Me, us, living in the flat... _ you. _ And it took me fucking forever and a day to come around to it, but it was only when you actually let yourself open up to me, Moony, last night when I got home, I—you made me realize something.”

“What,” I can’t help but breathe, if not to force myself to quit holding my breath as what feels like every league of the ocean laid out between us shrinks very rapidly with every moment I spend locked to Sirius’ gaze like this. It’s terrifying, gorgeously horrific but entirely thrilling to feel as though we are about to collide here the space we both call home.

“I don’t touch you,” Sirius says carefully, hand-picking his words, watching me with the sort of look that dares me to listen, “because it’s something I  _ want _ to do. I touch you because it’s something I can’t help  _ but _ do.”

Swallowing around a fierce tightness in my throat, still as a statue, I take a slow breath in and out. My heart is singing, clashing with the high whine of adrenaline in my veins, and I can do little but just continue fucking  _ breathing. _ “You’re lucky I’m clever, or I might have misconstrued that as an insult.”

Sirius blinks quickly, the line of his mouth twitching. “Oh, shit, well it— _ fuck.” _ He ruffles at the knot of his hair unconsciously. “You understand what I mean though, don’t you?”

There’s a unique sense of pleading in his stare that I’ve only ever seen before when Sirius is asking for forgiveness, and a pour of tenderness that wells up from my depths laps against the resistance I dropped in there long, long ago. I nod. “Why me though?”

It hurts to ask, but if I don’t I’ll always wonder. Something-something  _ more honest with myself _ , I suppose.

Sirius’ expression breaks and he smiles, broad and bright, and if I never see another sunny day again I would have this to tide me over. “Remus,” he half-laughs, pausing to tip his head sideways and shake his head a little at me in a way that might be frustrating were it not so sweet; “as if there’s ever  _ been  _ anyone else.”

For a terrifying moment I think I might cry, relief fills me so immediately and so sharply—my breath catches in my throat, my knees lock, the hair on the back of my neck stands up as though shot through with a spell. I suppose this is its own sort of spell though, hallowed and warm and binding. I stare at Sirius, wide-eyed. "If you're fucking with me," I breathe, "I'm going to absolutely murder you."

Sirius takes a step forward and the linoleum creaks ever so slightly beneath the strong arches of his bare feet. He has one hand on his hip but his smile is nothing sort of beatific, and suddenly I can't keep every sense of mine from snapping onto Sirius and refusing to let go. He grins a little, whether at himself or me I can't divine. "As tempting as it is to rile you up, I promise this isn't a joke."

I want to hit him on the arm. I want to jinx his hair into a thousand tiny knots. I want him to kiss me again. I want, I want, I bloody fucking  _ want. _

He reads me as easily as ever, stuck still against the door like I've cuffed myself to the doorknob. Sirius takes another step, another, and another—I can just barely hear his heartbeat thundering beneath his ribs, and somehow that gives me the strength to tug an inch of boldness out from the running stitch of my heart and reach out. 

"You're shaking," Sirius whispers as he stops just across from me and takes my hand. I curl my fingers through his, staring at the way our palms mesh, gently, as though our fingers might break at the joints if we press too fiercely at one another. 

I nod at nothing. I swallow. "Yeah."

Shutting my eyes as Sirius slips his free hand up to the back of my neck, I hear him sniff a tremulous little laugh to himself.  _ Yes, _ I want to cry,  _ if ever there was happiness it's this, here, us.  _ "You're still shaking," he points out, and this time his lips are in a small smile at the hollow height of my jaw. I reach up to the glossy sweep of his hair and clutch him closer, gently, carefully. 

"Kiss me." My breath puffs over the upper shell of Sirius' ear and I think for a moment that I'll have the preparation of him kissing my neck or my chin for just a moment—my entire body goes speechless when Sirius turns his face, takes his hand out of my grasp to place it firmly on my waist, and seals his mouth over mine. 

I've kissed a grand total of four people before now: my potions partner in year four behind the east greenhouses, a handsome Ravenclaw seeker in year six after the final cup match he'd only just secured for them by half a point, Lily's cousin Shannon at her and James' wedding with both of us drunk and moping on the balcony while everyone else was dancing, and a complete stranger at a queer pub last fall in the middle of London the evening after a particularly violent moon. 

None of those furtive moments, exploratory and cautious and, in most cases, confused, can even hold a fucking birthday candle to what it feels like to finally be kissing Sirius Black. 

He holds me like a gift and I let him, he pulls me closer and I let him—he tastes like cloves and peanut butter, smells like lavender and peanut butter, and the back of my mind thinks haughtily that we're going to have to do this again sometime when he hasn't been slathering peanut butter into his gob so I can see if my dreams really did have it right this whole time. 

"Fuck," I gasp the first time we break for air, panting for it after forgetting the minor fact of needing to breathe for several long, blissful seconds. We pant into the gap of one another's parted lips and I finally open my eyes, staring at his mouth and seeing Eden there for the first time. 

"Good fuck?" Sirius' mouth tips into a smirk and every buckle of shame strapped tightly around my insides shatters in a glorious burst of belonging. 

I nod wildly, my hair mussing against the tender clutch of Sirius' hand on the back of my head. "Good fuck."

We crush together again, my jacket skewing as Sirius' hand moves up my back, both of us suddenly hungry and surging like a swollen riverbed as we meet in another blood-deep kiss.

_ I want, _ my heart sings with every sprinting beat,  _ I want, I want, I want.  _

Time seems to fracture in the sweetest gasp of a fissure. One moment we're kissing helplessly against the front door, and the next we're limb-tangled on Sirius' bed and desperate for the taste of one another. 

I return to myself on a cottony rush, flushed and blushed and shot through with desire—panting, thrilled, halfway to half-hard as though my body has forgotten how to connect all its channels properly—when Sirius pauses with his knuckles just barely skimmed against my navel under the rucked hem of my shirt. 

"Can I?" 

I shiver at the delicacy of his voice and make a patently ridiculous little sob of a sound. Sirius kisses me again, his hand stilled, and doesn't pull back until I'm quite sure I've drowned in a deep cloud of perfect arrival.

"Your vocabulary," he hums against the cord of my neck, "is  _ staggering." _

"Christ." I pant the bite of it, hot and damp, into Sirius' hairline as his lips slip across my throat with lazy, open-mouthed grace. Knot long undone by either his fingers or mine, his hair pours along the sheets and the rounds of his shoulders like spilled ink. "Give me—" voice sticks to itself in ecstasy and I swallow, try again; "give me a moment, just a moment."

Sirius smoothes my own hair back from my forehead, and the gentle press of it drags the vague shapes of all my warmest memories right back up to my surface. 

_ Take this story into your dreams and let it play out there instead. _

I smile to myself as Sirius looks at me,  _ all _ of me, my heart open and crying its truths for perhaps the first time in my life, with contentment quivering in his eyes. 

"We don't have to," he assures me, a giddy smirk fighting for purchase on his lips, "but it—I just want to touch all of you, 'm sorry."

Sirius makes to move his hand away from my stomach and I stop him with a quick touch. We stare at one another for a long time, this strange and unmeasured stretch of it, with our shins cluttered together and our eyes starry-wide. "No sorry," I finally whisper. I guide his hand, palm flat, to rest across my skin beneath my shirt and watch Sirius come apart a little more behind his stare. "I'd—like to keep clothes on," I clarify with an undisguisable hitch in my voice as Sirius drags his thumb in a slow circle beneath my hand, "but I do want you to. Touch, I mean. Always have."

It seems words are too ungainly as Sirius leans forward again and noses his way gracefully into another kiss. I open to him, helplessly welcoming, and in that midst if I fail to hold back a few of my more embarrassing sounds it is entirely the fault of Sirius' touch finally finding its way across my stomach, my chest, the resting place of my naked heart. 

  
— _ fin— _


End file.
